B2G’s Operation Slim Fast is in full swing. Please see the tracking bug for details about what is happening. While there are a number of important fixes in the pipeline, memory consumption is still a critical issue for B2G simply because the devices don’t have much memory in the first place. Any additional help from Mozilla developers will be greatly appreciated. For example, if anyone can help identify unnecessary compartments, that would be helpful.

This is important for MemShrink because Memcheck can detect an important class of memory leaks — ones where all references to a block of memory are lost and so the block leaks forever. But it’s also important for Firefox as a whole because Memcheck can detect a slew of other memory-related errors, such as writing unaddressable memory (e.g. buffer overruns) and using undefined values in dangerous ways. These are the kinds of defects that cause crashes, security vulnerabilities, and other major problems.

The tests are currently hidden on TBPL because they only run on mozilla-central once a day, which is generally not enough for a test suite to be reliable enough to be worth unhiding. Having said that, the ability to write suppressions for errors found with Memcheck complicates considerations; see bug 800435 for further discussion.

Bug Counts

Here are the current bug counts.

P1: 19 (-2/+5)

P2: 101 (-2/+6)

P3: 91 (-6/+0)

Unprioritized: 13 (-1/+11)

The unprioritized count is high because we spent the first part of today’s MemShrink meeting talking with Gavin Sharp, Jared Wein and Felipe Gomes about the upcoming social API, and then spent some additional time discussing B2G with David Clarke. As a result we didn’t have time to triage the 23 new MemShrink bugs. We’ve scheduled an out-of-band MemShrink meeting for next week to get on top of the bug list.

Visiting Mountain View

I’ll be in Mountain View all next week for the JS team work week. I’ll be happy to meet up with anyone who wants to talk about memory consumption!

Thanks for following up on the bug (795221) and to Boris for fixing it. I was impressed at how quickly everyone jumped on it and diagnosed it. I’ll certainly try to keep an eye out for more bugs in the future.